Totoro and the Power of trinkets

Totoro and the power of trinkets

So I have a large library of videos that I have collected over the years that we watch from time to time. 

Digital backups are better for us because we can source subtitles from the internet (English for me, Japanese for my wife).

On a sleepy Sunday, my daughter wanted to watch Totoro.

totoro!

totoro!

totoro!

We have Totoro, it's on our media server,

…but the media server wasn't working.

The server version was out of sync with the app

Google had auto-updated my app, and Google doesn't allow rolling back.
so much like the house in the film my locally setup had eroded over time.

Oh I’ll fix it with this or this or this…

So there I was trying to troubleshoot servers, file permissions, version rollbacks, and I had really lost sight of what was important:

Totoro

I thought about what the movie is about, its about the simple joys of life

• The joy of a mountain stream

• tadpoles and puddles

• lending a helping hand

• welcoming people

• collecting flowers

• exploring the forest

• stashing acorns in secret places 

Remembering the spirit of the movie, I took a simpler approach.

I put it on a USB and plugged it in.

100% success rate.

This quick fix got me thinking about long-term solutions.

HDD

USB

Cool, I'll just plug in a big hard drive

But that is just shifting the responsibility of dealing with large amounts of files from the server to the video player app. Making me devalue the video app.

Not only does it need to handle lots of video types, but I expect:

• It is fast to read a large amount of files

• can deal with my HDD being fragmented (slower to read)

• It is easy to move around the folders

• It is easy and fast to search

So let's reduce these software expectations.

How can we simplify this even further? Let's make the folders physical… kinda.

[Totoro gift to Satsuki]

Make video cartridges with SD cards...

the reduced size of the storage, makes all the technical limitation disappear!

[Magic door disappears]

This is not the most cost-effective or space-effective solution but it's incremental & device agnostic & nearly infinitely scalable and just plain fun!

[Trinkets are fun]

There is something magic and wholesome giving,

my daughter little cute cards.

“Folders” are as easy to move around as picking up a card. Searching is as simple as flipping through a stack. Instead of one big HDD to manage, I have many small pieces that

I only manage once or twice.

[SD card library growing]

But more than that, this solution brings back the fun and wonder that Totoro is all about.

Just like Mei and Satsuki discover the magic in their new rural home, my daughter gets to discover the magic of choosing her own adventure from a pile of colorful trickets. It's tactile, it's simple, and it brings a sense of wonder to the whole process

I think this will be my preferred media library strategy going forward. Not just because it's practical, but because it keeps the magic alive.

fin~